That's right. As I said, the "open" that I am doing, is only _sometimes_ modifying the directory. I don't know why.

I would respectfully disagree with what some of the other Monks seem to be saying, is that overwriting a file, must touch the directory. As shown below.

the question is, why do my Perl scripts sometimes do it and sometimes don't - and I checked, all they do explicitly, is open for writing, and write, and close, not remove anything

The reason I care, is because I am a makefiles guy. As such, I don't want to touch _anything_ that does not need absolutely need to be touched, so that the system does not rebuild too much. Yes I do have dependencies on directories (meaning, their contents listing). When I do Perl scripts, sometimes, they will open an existing file for writing, and the directory gets touched. That's bad for me.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other